Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Burmecia]

I realized doing it isn't FUN [...] fast paced "gotcha" mechs aren't that.

My opinion about EW >> DT "difficulty" bump, too.
I'm casual player too, yadda yadda, can do anything on difficulty level MSQ basically in.
I've quit doing certain things in game because the current difficulty expressio isn't my cup of tea.

[CidHeiral]

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs. They cannnot progress any further, especially if, as Yoshi has said, it will get even more difficult.

I know my post is coming from only one part of the fandom, but I also know that many other parts are unhappy, so what should they do ... or will they go down the Blizz route and not listen to anyone?

Actually the devs listened to feedback like yours almost exclusively for quite some time which resulted in the encounters and jobs being in a horrendously boring state for the vast majority of the player base.

That being said I'm sure most people can empathize with your situation. If you're having more difficulty with the content than the average player you have many options available to you, including recruiting friends or other players to help. Someone in my FC has a partner who is literally blind and they were still able to guide them through the MSQ. If they can accomplish that I would be shocked if you couldn't as well if you put your mind to it. People in this thread would probably help as well if you were more specific about what exactly you're having trouble with.

[Azurarok]

Personally I rather roulettes be relatively smooth most of the time, just not mindnumbingly repetitive. If the game needs to rely on players messing up a bunch for that to happen I feel there's a design problem that needs to be addressed in way that's a little more creative than "make players mess up more often"

[Supersnow845]

This problem (as with every problem in 14) comes back to the awful job design

Back in the day (meaning pre EW in even including ShB here) difficulty of an encounter was collectively split across the job and the encounter. For some reason in ShB and EW the devs decided that the best way to go forward was to streamline the jobs into nothing which led to EW being notoriously easy. Then when people complained square compensated in DT by making the encounters slightly harder rather than fixing the jobs. This creates hard floors on encounters caused by lack of granular difficulty on the jobs

So in my opinion the easy slop jobs with DT encounters is roughly a decent difficulty (if boring) same as putting HW jobs in HW encounters but jobs allow more granular difficulty which is why they need to be the focus

[LaylaTsarra]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

[CCheshire]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

Like I said, the NA and EU demo timer started up again after a long break, so the abandoned houses have been freed for a few months now.

tbf apart from EXDR, I don't do the new AR or repeat the Arcadian raids unless I want the tokens after I'm done then I'm fine with ignoring it forever.

[Supersnow845]

The DT aoe spam meta and oh remember the order in which they go off super fast isn't fun. Many of us clear the content and don't go back. Don't need dungeons to cap tomes. Been here since 2.0 Beta and never felt this way before.

Lots are leaving and lets be sure to push as many casuals out as possible while we are at it.

Seeing lots of plots opening up on many of the DC's and servers I'm on wonder why?

The thing is you can argue people are just as much being pushed out in the other direction, a lack of content that somewhat repeatable with interesting mechanics that doesn’t go towards savage.

It’s hard to quantify if EW->DT was a net positive in impact for the playerbase specifically in regards to casual encounter quality

[Miki_L]

When people asked for more engaging dungeons, I don't think people just wanted harder bosses. This is a fault with the FFXIV devs, they only think about boss fights.

The trash pulls are still boring and that is the biggest problem, as it is the main way a dungeon can differentiate itself from a raid encounter. Even though the bosses are harder, you still don't need to know how to tank or heal. It's harder to do ARR dungeons as a support than in Dawntrail.

At the same time, Trusts are still stupidly punishing for some reason. You die once and it's a wipe, even though your "Healer" might still be alive. They let you use phoenix down in group content, which was a good change, but trusts are still hard for no reason. Why can't they be the story difficulty on the dungeons? That are nearly impossible to fail while roulette can be left harder.

Even though Dawntrail dungeons are more difficult than Endwalker, I still think they failed in how that difficulty was distributed.

Not to mention one reason why people might not want to do dungeons anymore is because the rewards are crap. Gear with terrible ILVLs (except for the times they happen to be old content bis like Ultimates). And to make matters worse, they are undyeable. I tried using gear from one of the recent dungeons lately in a glam set but gave up because I couldn't get colors to match.

[Eastwall]

Actually, gw2 had a dungeon finder beta recently. It is almost impossible to fail. If you die, an npc shows up and revive you. I ignored mechanics in purpose and died 10+ times in kinfall and still got a clear. I think ff14 might need that for the trust system.

[DiaDeem]

professional players